The producer known as ACTRESS and his r&b concrète

yeah agree

i was disappointed by r.i.p at the time, idk, maybe bc of the absence of vocals and it being less apparently danceable, it felt like a collection of inwardly-turned idm fragments to me. i am discovering, to my regret, that this was an extremely surface-level reading!!! "raven" and "shadow from tartarus" and "caves of paradise" are amazing and i don't even know what "jardin" is

I like the description of it as "a twilight interzone between rest and wakefulness"

(from the Wire end of year 2012)

feels in retrospect like R.I.P was a peak along with Splazsh

although Hazyville, Ghettoville, and AZD were all pretty much equally amazing

R.I.P. and Ghettoville are both amazing

splazsh and ghettoville are my favorites

also he is an amazing DJ

This could either be something special or a complete mess:

https://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whats-on/131511-actress-x-stockhausen-sin-x-ii-2019

ghettoville is my favorite, absolutely scraped out

feel like i could put any track from it on a mix with early godflesh and no one would blink

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yo0BniC5oco

New LP, Karma and Desire, coming out in October.

... combining titles of two of my favorite records by artists named "Pharoah(e)"!

His new album was supposed to come out last month. I wonder what happened.

AT LAST

https://thequietus.com/articles/28603-actress-new-album-88

I couldn't figure out the clue but I found a link to the unlocked album regardless

88 is out now. Ninja Tune will release Karma & Desire in October 2020.

oh now its obvious!

Heavy later BoC vibe a few minutes in.

Yeah, I'm really enjoying this so far.

This drifts along very nicely, I like the deep bass sound. BoC vibes is otm!

this is awesome

I agree!

To me it sounds extremely Flying Lotus, and also maybe like he got some Korg Volcas? The synth textures feel very familiar to me (and I use a lot of Volcas). Also its more like a 22 minute beat tape than an album, but none of these are bad things, I'm into it.

Although some of these beats wear out their welcome by the time they hit 2 min, as opposed to his murky & detailed tracks that feel like they could go on forever.

Actress is less sprawl-prone than FL. His tracks come across as self-enclosed, gnomic fragments ('hedgehogs', per Fr. Schlegel) more so than FL's comparatively maximalist approach. I'm also tempted to argue that Actress is paradoxically closer to the core Warp aesthetic than FL.

True, FlyLo packs a lot into his 2 min tracks.

On the plus side I'm currently listening to AZD again, what an album.

i hear shake shakir in the newest actress but shake has just generally been on my mind so idk

lol at the emails from actress with subject lines looking like straight up spam

anybody call the phone number?

i did there was some music
meh

Karma & Desire strikes me as his piano album, and in some ways his vocal album as well, with feats. by Zsela, Sampha, Aura T-09 and Christel Well. He gets more out of this spartan palette than when he's collaborating with a full orchestra as on LAGEOS. There's also plenty of overtly electronic material that hearkens back to the work for which he's best known, so the the risk of monotony is averted throughout. At first pass, this has got to be one of his best releases so far.

Also, 'Public Life', a bona fide solo piano piece performed by Vanessa Benelli Mosell, is better than anything on Drukqs imo.

ohhhhhh my god

on one level seems like a straight-up gorgeous nighttime house record, on another seems like one of his most formally ambitious and realized projects

2020: year of the dance full-length for people who love doing it wrong

Yeah, I love when he convincingly reminds you that you don't have to choose.

xp

in a year that was less stacked this would be my aoty easy. maybe it is

ok wow this is something else

Oh my actual goodness this is unreal

This is superb. It'll sound daft, but it's making me miss London so much - London at night, black streets in the rain, the blind foreheads of houses, the promise of solace behind every door.

I hesitate to invoke the B word but a lot of the stuff he's doing with claustral atmospheres and the slurring of voices is kinda Burial-adjacent.

I was just thinking that. Album feels like a cross between Drukqs and Burial. And it's fantastic.

this is great, much better than the last mixtape, it feels so singular and uncompromising

Actress is my favourite artist recording name ever, I think. I find it compellingly blank and suggestive at the same time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ovr3Zh28ZtQ

This is classic Actress but very much a headphones album (or at least a solitary/nighttime album), I made the mistake of putting it on during morning coffee time while my partner was around and it sounded really dumb in that context. :(

i listened to this over the weekend after first listens of a few other things and 1) i enjoyed it, 2) i was impressed by it, 3) i thought 'this is hipster music that will probably not go over great in a social context'

Haha.

'Gliding Squares' is the least Actress-y track on here but it's lovely.